Protecting Alaska's Cook Inlet watershed and the life it sustains since 1995.
On Monday, I saw a helicopter pilot I hadn’t seen in 14 years. Stan piloted my first trip in Bristol Bay to sample small headwater streams near the Pebble deposit. Seeing Stan brought up a flood of memories and names of people who have contributed to the decades of work to protect Bristol Bay, each […]
The blue lines on topographic maps necessarily under-represent the complex movement of freshwater across floodplains, through wetlands and gravel bars. For a juvenile fish, the blue lines are experienced as a maze of currents, temperature, food and hiding places, while a migrating adult salmon wends its way along the blue lines of riffles and pools […]
Cook Inletkeeper has been keeping a watchful eye on the west side of the Susitna River for years. When the state of Alaska permitted a 315-mile right-of-way for a gas pipeline to fuel the proposed Donlin Gold Mine, cutting a massive swath from Cook Inlet, over the Alaska Range to the mine site, we joined […]
Salmon are no canaries. They have robust life-history strategies and diverse habitat needs. If we keep their freshwater habitat cold, clean and intact and their marine food web stable without large blobs of warm water, wild Pacific salmon will persist and continue to contribute to global and local food security. Their greatest vulnerability is that […]
You look at seed catalogs in December. You buy snow blowers in June. You mend nets in August. You prepare for your future guided by your hopes for the future. So let’s all brush aside the fog of uncertainty clouding our vision over these last 18 months and prepare for the future we want in […]
I’ve never been a fan of scary movies. All the anticipation and fear of knowing that bad things are around the corner – and there’s nothing to do about it – is not my idea of fun. I think that’s why I’ve been committed to monitoring salmon stream health during this time of rapid change. […]
As I read the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC Sixth Assessment, Summary for Policymakers 2021), I was surprised. Not by the content. We have been hearing about wildfire and floods and melting glaciers for years. We have read we have until 2030 to make real change in our carbon emissions. We know […]
After a year of not seeing our longtime supporters due to the pandemic or the opportunity to meet new people with different perspectives at in-person events, we really wanted to hear directly from Alaskans. So, we developed a survey to understand community-specific concerns about threats to water resources—both old and new—as we consider future projects […]
In my early years learning about the ecology of streams, I spent a few summers in the sagebrush country of southeastern Oregon. I was studying desert springs measuring water chemistry, collecting bugs and identifying plants associated with each little oasis. I was discovering the complex connections of the natural world at a very micro-scale. I also learned […]
This summer we shared our latest paper on the importance of freshwater conditions for Cook Inlet Chinook Salmon and highlighted how important it is to understand stream-specific responses to climate change for better management of our valuable fisheries. Now we’d like to put the spotlight on other important research going on that is helping us […]
A new study – led by University of Alaska researchers and in collaboration with Cook Inletkeeper – provides the first evidence that declines in many of Alaska’s Chinook salmon populations can be attributed in part to climate-driven changes in their freshwater habitats.
Climate Crisis Sends Stream Temperatures Off the Charts As Alaskans suffer through the smoke, haze and danger of a record-breaking heat wave, Alaska’s salmon are suffering too. On July 7th, stream temperatures topped 81.7 F (27.6 C) in the Deshka River, a major salmon stream on the west side of Cook Inlet in the Mat […]
